Tuesday 8 October: Daniel Kaluuya has joined our ‘Scenes in the Square’ trail by our consumer initiative Discover Leicester Square, with a statue celebrating his performance in Jordan Peele’s cultural phenomenon and Academy Award® winning film, ‘Get Out’, which helped launch Kaluuya’s extraordinary cinema career.

The statue was chosen in a poll of 5,000 film fans conducted with Show Film First which aimed to gather the public’s opinions on the current generation of British cinema stars. Kaluuya was the highest-polling actor, with one in five people voting him as the star they would most like to see honoured in Leicester Square.

Universal Pictures’ ‘Get Out,’ a Blumhouse/QC Entertainment production in association with Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, was a runaway success following its release in 2017, earning four Academy Award® nominations, including Best Picture, Actor (Daniel Kaluuya), and Director (Jordan Peele), and won Peele the Oscar® for Original Screenplay and also topped box office records, earning more than $250 million worldwide and becoming the highest-grossing debut film based on an original script in Hollywood history.

The statue, joining a line-up of classic icons from the past 100 years of cinema, including Harry Potter, Batman, Wonder Woman, Mary Poppins and Gene Kelly, depicts a pivotal scene in which Kaluuya’s character, Chris Washington, is hypnotised by his girlfriend’s mother (Oscar® nominee Catherine Keener) and finds himself receding into ‘The Sunken Place’, a supressed metaphysical abyss. This scene is a particular stand-out that helped launch ‘Get Out’ to unforeseen levels of success, which, in turn, had a similar effect on Kaluuya’s stardom by cementing his status as a rising British talent. Peele’s invented terminology created ripple effects throughout culture as it became the most apt metaphor likening Black people’s experience with marginalization and objectification.

Kaluuya debuted on screens in the 2000s, making appearances in popular British TV shows such as ‘Skins,’ ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Black Mirror.’ However, the release of ‘Get Out’ in 2017 propelled his name to global heights, leading into roles in the likes of ‘Black Panther’ and an Oscar®-winning turn in ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’. Kaluuya, who began his career as a writer on ‘Skins,’ most recently made his directorial and feature film writing debut with ‘The Kitchen’, which he also produced. The film closed the prestigious 67th BFI London Film Festival in 2023.

The unveiling of the ‘Get Out’ statue of Kaluuya in October coincides with Halloween and the UK’s Black History Month, in keeping both with the film’s horror genre and its themes that highlight the culture of Black Americans and their lived experiences.

Mark Williams, Deputy Chief Executive for Heart of London Business Alliance, comments: 

“We are excited to welcome Daniel Kaluuya and Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ to our Scenes in the Square line-up as a celebration of a modern cinematic success and homegrown British talent. It points to a bright future for our trail, with Kaluuya as a chosen symbol of the future of entertainment, and it is a pleasure to be able to spotlight such a pioneering film.